Silverpop, now IBM Marketing Cloud offers robust marketing automation, dated UI means learning curve

Originating in the Email Service Provider (ESP) space, Silverpop was acquired by IBM and has evolved to become IBM Marketing Cloud. The core feature set still revolves around email with sophisticated features such as "Send Time Optimization" which samples users opens and schedules each contacts mailings for when they are most likely to open your email. Building on a simple workflow system, Marketing Cloud now offers Blueprints for the most common opportunities such as warming campaigns, retargeting and automated responses. A recent rearchitecture has brought the user-interface in line with other IBM Blue Mix and Commerce platforms. The updates also mean that IBM's mix of SAAS such as the new Customer Analytics and the existing WebSphere Commerce content platform. The future looks bright for Marketing Cloud with coming integration with IBM Watson preparing to lead the way with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence guiding contact segmentation and product targeting. But its current position places it in steep competition with market leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager and Marketo. The promised integration with Watson and the recent updates with SMS and push notification integration merit Marketing Cloud a closer look when looking for a marketing automation solution.

Pros

Flexible integration and reasonable pricing to add a comprehensive feature set for the digital marketer.

Cons

Parts of the UI have yet to be updated hiding much needed functionality deep in menus. The reporting module needs to be revisited with an archaic interface and burying much needed web tracking features.

It is a useful tool when you have strategies associated with digital marketing.

Definitely the best benefit is reflected in the return on investment, since it uses a digital marketing platform based on the cloud and is more easily integrated with other applications and customer data sources.

Pros

Now it's called Watson Campaign Automation (IBM Marketing Cloud) allows you to offer your clients exceptional experiences throughout the purchasing process, using customer data, providing value information extracted from analytics and automating multi-channel interactions.

Is a digital marketing automation platform designed to put the power of data in the hands of the marketer. Use behavioral data from any source to create consistent campaigns wherever your customers are through channels like email, web, mobile apps, SMS, social, group messaging and more.

Cons

You must have a great knowledge in the area to know how to interpret the data, in the same way the information reflected is quite complex.

Great Product for Mid-Size Businesses

Pros

Setup of the system and getting everything established is a very quick process, particularly if you have used Silverpop previously. It very quickly allows you to add users (unlimited) and assign permission levels. Mailings are very easy to create, although the WYSIWYG mailing editor isn't the best (an entirely new mailing creation process is going to be implemented in the somewhat near future from my understanding). Hopefully, IBM's acquisition of Silverpop will add some resources to get things done faster and offer some more advanced features. Silverpop also has an annual conference (Amplify) in May each year that is outstanding. It's great, particularly for new users, to really become immersed in the system and learn best practices and how to use some of the more advanced functionality.

Cons

There is slow implementation of UI fixes and enhancements. Testing of the automated mailings is daunting and difficult.

A powerful marketing tool let down by clunky interface and difficult integration

Pros

Ability to manage contacts at scale, with very rare outages and reasonable cost versus competing products

Cons

Interface is looking increasingly old-fashioned, client support can be hard to reach, and help manuals for integration can be hard to locate

Abysmal failure

Just fine if your emails are not professional grade or missions critical.

Pros

They were one of the least expensive options out there. Very hyped up and robust systems. Convinced our marketing department that they could deliver

Cons

Many of their basic features don't function as expected. Their hyped up options never materialized. It tooks months of testing to figure out how to get their system to accept what we were sending. Frequent outages shut functions down. They developed a bug that silently stopped responding to hard bounces, which caused thousands of black-list email addresses to build up in our lists. When notified them of the error, rather than fix the error and purge the stale emails, Silverpop's response was to turn off our accounts sending and deny everything. In attempting to work with them we are realizing that we as a customer know more about email systems than their technical employees. Checked Glassdoor review on them to confirm everything I suspected was true

Has potential but very difficult interface

I'm hoping with recent purchase of Red Hat and other competitive technologies that IBM makes stronger improvements. It was the most affordable product but had a lot of drawbacks with it.

Pros

Allowed us to begin integrating our marketing under one system

Cons

The interface is very difficult to interact with and the customer support is not very strong. Takes a very long time to produce reports and export the numbers we need.

Automation!

Pros

Marketing Cloud makes targeting audiences and sending focused campaigns incredibly easy. And everything can be automated to make it super easy.

Cons

Their customer support system could use some work. I have had mixed experiences and cannot depend on always getting a resolution.

We have been working with Silverpop as a communication and marketing agency. We serve different types of customers: big, small, B2B, B2C. We do the whole range of Marketing Automation, Content driven Lead generation, Lead Nurturing, Lead Management, Social Media Marketing, Brand Management, Partner Marketing, Corporate Communications, Channel Communication, Digital PR and Analog PR. In Silverpop we found the partner we needed to reach our customers expectations. They help us to deliver state-of-the-art communication. They have a strong solution with sophisticated features. To be honest, this is what we can expect from solutions these days. What we can't expect and this is where the real difference is: The people there are great, have passion, and it's above average knowledge and engagement. People make a project happen, so well done Silverpop Team.

We felt like they did not care about our company after we signed the contract.

We purchased training from them and they did not give us all of our training hours. There were problems with their system internally and they were not helpful enough with these issues. Our offices are right across the street from their location. There was 1 gentleman that was very helpful in person (I think his name was Michael, he trained us), but everyone else lacked luster.

Pros

ability to update and make quick changes

Cons

customer service

We were looking at several other marketing automation vendors, but ultimately chose Silverpop due to their email deliverability. When it comes to comparing their email capabilities to the other guys - they are just one step ahead. With Silverpop, you don't have to worry about them using a third party vendor for sending emails out and the additional costs associated or worry about having to be on a shared IP address like some of the other folks. At the end of the day, if you can't get your message out and into people's inboxes, what's the point of even leveraging a marketing automation solution in the first place? With Silverpop, I am confident that my company's message is being received.

The problem we've had with other email marketing platforms is languages. Our site is in 8 different languages and 15 different currencies, meaning we send a lot of different emails! We've been really pleased with Silverpop, having switched from another emarketing supplier. The transition was quick an easy, and the guys in the support team were super helpful, even considering some of the ridiculous questions we had! Great guys to work with and it's a fantastic piece of software. Our open rates have definitely improved, and we're seeing a better click through rate too - all you can ask of an email-marketing platform!

Strong product. Continued innovation...

Frequent platofrm releases. Ease of navigation. All features available. Great phone & web support. Good KnowledgeBase & Customer Community. Dynamic Content, Landing Pages, A/B Testing, Program/Touchplan creation, Database Scoring, strong API toolset, Deliverability Tools & performance, etc. It's all there in a stable, predictable platform...